In the tobacco industry, the reclamation of tobacco from unsold cigarette packs, known as returned goods tobacco reclamation, requires the separation of various types of returned goods. For example, in recovering tobacco it is desirable to separate unusable from reusable goods and, with regard to the reusable portion, to separate menthol from non-menthol tobaccos. It may also be desirable to further separate foreign made cigarettes from domestic, in view of the difference in taste characteristics. It may also be desired to separate returned packs by brand, in order to retain the individual taste characteristics of the recovered tobacco. This operation has heretofore required manual separation, resulting in unacceptable separation errors and high labor costs.
At the present time, most packaged goods are sold in containers or packs carrying a universal product code, or UPC bar code, which identifies the goods. These codes can be read by a scanner, and the electronic signal thus produced can be used for various purposes such as inventory tracking and sales transactions.
Proposals have also been made to utilize the UPC code for purposes of sorting products. An example of one proposal in the tobacco industry is set out in Emery et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,622,875. There, returned cigarette packs are moved along a conveyor and scanned by a UPC bar code reader. Packages are slit open by a water knife, and thereafter pass a series of air nozzles. The air nozzles are selectively activated by solenoid valves to apply pressurized air against the sides of the packs to blow the packs off the conveyor line at the appropriate location.
The Emery et al. system utilizes a first pair of ejector nozzles, followed by a pack sensor, and a second ejector nozzle for ejecting packages selected for ejection which were not ejected by the first ejector nozzles. It would be desirable to have a pack sortation system which does not require a backup ejection system and which does not require multiple air ejectors and associated solenoid controls.